Crushpad moves into new digs and new horizons

San Francisco’s Crushpad, the custom facility for small-lot winemaking, will soon move from its Potrero Hill location to new, larger digs at the American Industrial Center about a mile south of AT&T Park. A Spring Open House is planned, but so is much more, including involvement in a PBS reality TV series and a brand incubator program, Crushpad Commerce, that will allow winemaking enthusiasts to go public wherever they live, and whenever they are ready.

If you have given more than passing thought to making wine, or have dabbled with the experience, you can now rise from that comfortable armchair to take your hobby to the big time. According to the Crushpad website, the Crushpad Commerce program allows anyone to turn their passion for wine into a full-fledged commercial wine brand without the high cost, complexity or time commitment required to operate a traditional winery.

Like the effect from a 15.5% Petite Sirah, that’s mighty heady stuff. Consider the complexity issue alone:

Access to great fruit, facilities and knowledgeable winemakers is further complicated by the need to store wine, create a brand, promote your brand and maintain a fulfillment infrastructure. Add to this the ongoing federal and state alcohol regulatory and compliance hurdles and [the process of producing wine] can get dizzyingly complex, expensive and time-consuming. That’s where Crushpad Commerce comes in. Crushpad Commerce hides the underlying complexities of operating a wine brand and enables you to focus on the areas where you can provide the most value – styling and promoting your wines. We take care of the rest. 

I imagine that for many who love wine and would go beyond simple drinking, collecting, or winemaking as a hobby, the Crushpad proposition is an attractive one. Indeed, some avid oenophiles are already attending Crushpad’s Wine Branding and Sales Workshop on April 21, 2007 at Crushpad’s new 30,000-square-foot winery. This workshop is tailored to over 50 Crushpad clients who in the process of launching their own wine brands. If the workshop is successful, you can bet that there will be more workshops scheduled.

As to reality winemaking on TV, Crushpad has teamed up with Doc City Productions to collaborate on six one-hour competitive reality episodes of PBS’ The Wine Makers series, wherein portions of the program will be set in Crushpad’s new San Francisco winery, and where the winning wine will be made. According to a Business Wire press release, twelve contestants, chosen from an initial pool of over 600 applicants, will experience every aspect of the wine industry from viticulture and enology to sales and marketing - but only one will be chosen to create and launch their own wine label.

That’s not to mention that the winner will also get to produce 5,000 cases, according to Avenue Vine.

While I’m not a fan of reality TV, I applaud Crushpad’s initiatives designed around experience-based learning, and therefore I just might watch when the series airs this Fall. And yet I am toying with the promise, and am envisioning my own reality. Maybe I’ll roll up my sleeves and jump in to the Crushpad Commerce experience. 

That’s a big maybe. But it’s good to know that a humble lil’ ol’ winehiker like me can hit the Big Wine Time too. Hmmm, do you think I should contact Silicon Valley Bank? 

~winehiker

The winehiker was recently joined by the Basic Juice Crew at Crushpad to create a Rhone-style blend. Please see my post, “She Mighty Mighty”: the blending of the Basic Juice Crew Red.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 12:25 pm and is filed under grape squeezins, tasting venues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.